I joined Full Belly Farm sometime mid-winter. A box of whatever fruits and vegetables are being harvested at the farm in the Capay Valley, north-east of here, would be waiting for me at the community pick-up site near my house. I knew not to expect tomatoes and cucumbers, but I was a little puzzled by some of the contents of my first box.
The carrots were familiar, but the rutabaga, parsnips, celery root and bunches of leafy greens were vegetables I had only seen in passing at the grocery store. I turned to clean, unused pages of my cookbooks, and in some cases, to what felt like remote corners of the internet, to find how to prepare these strange vegetables.
Gingerly, I served the new dishes, appealing to the family’s sense of adventure. They went along with it, spearing the unfamiliar root chunks and spooning out globs of wilty greens. They liked some things, tolerated others, disliked a few, but overall, joined me in the plunge into this new way of eating.
It was not only new vegetables, it was a large quantity of these new vegetables. With another box coming in just a week, I had to serve two vegetables a meal to get through the contents without throwing any of our precious, lovingly-grown produce away. The contents of the boxes changed as the weeks went by.
The leeks, celery root and greens made way for lettuces, new potatoes and asparagus. Green beans, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant followed, and then on to cabbage, beets and winter squash, and eventually back to root vegetables and greens. The produce seemed to change just about the time we were ready for some new tastes and textures, and we began to look forward to favorites we knew were coming back around soon.
The first strawberries and peaches in spring and summer were occasions for celebrations, as were the winter squash and even the greens when their time came again. My weekly menus began to take their shape from the rotating contents of the boxes. Seasons, the broad categories of winter, spring, summer and fall, gained new dimension as they began to be flavored by the crops we had come to expect with each one.
The process of learning to eat local, fresh foods has not just been a change of diet; it’s getting in step with the rhythms of the natural world around us. The changes in the weather, the light, and our schedules are complemented by the changes in our food. It’s the comfort of predictability, the hope of newness just around the corner. It’s like eating delicious pizza with toe-tapping jazz–it just feels like there’s more life in it.
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